


I'm Your Pain When You Can't Feel

by Kissing_Toast



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Soulless Sam Winchester, season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-03
Updated: 2015-09-03
Packaged: 2018-04-18 21:07:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4720481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kissing_Toast/pseuds/Kissing_Toast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short drabble I wrote about Soulless!Sam</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm Your Pain When You Can't Feel

The world tilts and presents him with the image of his dead brother. Heaven, he thinks. Or Hell… That’s where Sammy is and that's where he must be too because the apocalypse shook an old yellow-eyed goat loose and then the world went black.

 

Relief sours, turns to aversion because Sam just isn't Sam. Not overtly, but little things give Dean pause. A smile that isn't his smile. Empty grin and disjointed face. Expressions play like an 8mm film, old and warped and parts of it missing, eroded over time.

 

Not right, not clean. Old warnings in new editions, like an upgrade from vinyl to laser disc. And Sammy came back wrong.

 

Every day is disconcertion. Car to motel room to working the case. Not right, not him. Lather, rinse, repeat. Same old body but someone new in the driver's seat.

 

This impostor doesn't sleep, doesn't feel, doesn't even really care about Dean. And it peddles subterfuge like a hooker peddles sex but Dean can read the fallacy:

“No matter what happens I can always count on you, right, Sammy?”

“Yeah. Of course, Dean.” Doesn’t even bat an eye, but he looks wrong, sounds wrong.

 

Dean can forget for moments at a time but his skin crawls whenever Sam is near and when he gets cursed with truth he asks for the sake of it.

"I can't lie here. Do you really think I would let something like that happen on _purpose?_ You're my _brother._ ”

But the lie is hollow, doesn’t suffice, and Dean still wants the truth but doesn’t know what that truth will turn out to be.

 

And it walks like a man and it talks like a man but it's not. Counterfeit sibling reading from a script, empty inside if he rips it open and takes a peek.

 

A year of lies, and those lies become a tumor and that tumor swallows his soul. Just like the Cage did Sam's. And it's so easy to blame and to hate but he can't lay that hate on his brother when even misery won't be his friend. While a monster parades as family and family don't end with blood but blood runs dry because the Devil got his due. Because fate will always kick your ass and leave you naked and torn and friggin' angels bone you every time.

 

Hazel orbs shine empty. A face as a mask and a mask parading as his brother. Using people, killing things. Not his business but hurtful all the same.

 

"I'm not your brother. I'm not Sam.”

A knife to the gut but he already knew. Already envisaged ways to gank the Sam that isn't Sam.

 

"Let's just say I think I should probably go back to being him.”

More lies, more posturing and how can his not-brother think Dean would believe those words?

 

"We do what we got to do. And we get my brother back." Dean makes the distinction by design because what he wants to save is not what he expresses the intention to, not the shell sitting before him, cheap imitation.

 

Their blood begets blood but Sammy is broken and all Dean can focus on besides the heartache is fixing him. And Sam’s forgotten why they fight and Dean can’t deal with the thing that looks like his brother but isn’t. Asks him to stop pretending.

 

This incomplete pretender has no instincts, bar survival. And while Dean will do anything to get his real brother back, he suspects Sam will do anything to stop him. A calculated risk but one he's willing to make if it will bring Sammy home.

 

The truth shall set you free. Only it doesn't. It's cold comfort and dull ache and gnawing guilt. No more Mom, no more Dad, no more Sam... and there's a soul in a cage and Death making him choose. And he has to die to bargain and bargain to survive. And another brother gets passed over and forgotten.

 

The empty thing begs him not to, threatens with baleful eyes and screams his defiance while a Horseman makes him whole.

 

Days later and Bobby keeps questioning Death's caveat, keeps predicting failure; a bloody end for Sam. But their lives have always been besmirched with blood, a hemal river flowing from out the past. Demonic ichor and fraternal essence and hunter's filiation – progenitor of their fate. Red line of desolation that can't be healed but it all falls away when Sammy wakes up and holds him tight.


End file.
